Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The Blockbuster movie-download kiosks–slated to start their trial in June–will download movies directly into consumer-owned portable devices in about two minutes, according to a demo at the company’s shareholder meeting Wednesday (May 28).

Blockbuster officials want the NCR-developed kiosk to be able to download films in about 30 seconds “as Blockbuster is striving for an ATM-like experience,” said Blockbuster CEO James Keyes, according to this report in The Hollywood Reporter. “Keyes later told reporters he could envision a monthly subscription fee of $10 along with a free device give-away down the line. Games would be ‘a wonderful addition’ to the kiosk service in the future as well,” he said. The trial will start at a few stores in Dallas and will initially only work with devices made by Archos.…

PCI's plan to address these vulnerabilities had been delayed for two years, which has crippled compliance efforts. As the requirement is about to kick in in June, merchants are not thinking so much about PCI, unless their annual PCI compliance review date happens to coincide with the PCI 6.6 effective date. Read more...

At $388 billion in annual revenue, handling Wal-Mart’s ERP financial application is nothing if not challenging. But when Wal-Mart last year turned to SAP to take over many of the financial functions that the chain had been handling with in-house software, it was a concession that it can’t push its homegrown apps as far as it used to. This is especially true as the company continues its aggressive global expansion.

Wal-Mart CFO Tom Schoewe said this month that the first phase of the global roll-out is expected to be completed in the next two years, with two remaining phases kicking in over the next five years, according to Wal-Mart spokesperson John Simley. “It is a departure for us to standardize on something (from a third-party) rather than homegrown,” Simley said. …

The employee has been dubbed a whistleblower and it's been suggested that TJX was wrong to have terminated the guy. In this case, I have to stand up for TJX: They were completely within their rights to terminate this employee. As for the charges themselves, those are dramatically more troubling. Read more...

A handful of grocery chains—including PriceChopper and Wegmans—have started using CRM data to alert customers to product recalls. It’s an encouraging move to convince consumers that loyalty cards can be used to help them beyond taking 10 cents off a gallon of milk.

The program at PriceChopper—a 116-store grocery chain in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont–is especially interesting as it uses an automatic phone-calling system to instantly and simultaneously reach out to impacted customers. Last month, the system was used to reach out to some 12,000 customers about a recall of Samuel Adams beer due to glass fragments, according to this intriguing report in the Daily Gazette, a daily newspaper from Schenectady, N.Y..…

The new machines are called e-Spot automated retail shops and are designed to deliver consumer electronics—initially offering iPods, digital cameras, camcorders, mobile accessories and headphones priced anywhere from $15 to $350—as though they were candy, literally. The machines function just as a candy or sandwich vending machine does, in that they accept the payment (typically a credit card or a gift card) and then drop the product to where the customer can retrieve it. Read more...

So when she places the barcode-less fruit on the scale, the first fruit it displays in its list is kiwi, followed by the four fruits and vegetables that Jane typically buys. Other fruits and vegetables follow alphabetically after Jane's favorites have been displayed. Given how many fruits Jane buys each time, this shaves a precious 108 seconds off of her checkout. Read more...

The 59-year-old Mervyns department store chain, with 177 stores in seven states and about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, certainly can’t be accused of rushing into technological fads. On Tuesday (May 20), some 15 years after the World Wide Web launched, Mervyns announced that it would launch an E-Commerce site sometime “in the fourth quarter of 2008.”

The site—which a Mervyns statement said “could quickly grow into a $50 million business”—will be outsourced to an unspecified “nationally recognized provider of turnkey order entry and fulfillment services.” What’s next? Maybe next year they’ll explore these new-fangled push-button telephones.…

But there really is no reason to wait. Why? The proof is in the tracking tools. Whether the 1.2 release of PCI DSS in October 2008 specifically addresses server, network and desktop virtualization is less important than being able to provide proof to your PCI assessor that you can control, manage and track access to card data continuously.Read more...

The grocery challenge with the theft of moist, fresh products–such as cheese–has frustrated retail loss prevention managers because such products tend to react poorly with EAS tags. Checkpoint and Sealed Air Cryovac announced Wednesday (May 21) one possible way around this issue.

Cryovac has started to integrate anti-theft labels inside the vacuum shrink bags. “The first market request to Sealed Air Cryovac was for two million packs for the protection of Parmigiano Reggiano. In Italy, for instance, Parmigiano Reggiano has a shrink rate of about 9 percent,” said a joint statement. “Initial studies have shown that this RF-EAS source tagging program may cut down inventory shrinkage of dairy products from 9 percent to 1 percent.”…

As more consumers use search engines to find products filtered by a single attribute–such as price–shopping cart abandonment rates are increasing, according to E-Commerce vendor MarketLive, which tracks such matters.

The shopping cart abandonment rate went up 2.7 percent, from 57.88 percent in Q1 2007 to 59.43 percent in the first quarter of this year, while “one-and-out” visits to E-Commerce sites jumped 18.9 percent, from 32.94 percent to 39.15 percent, based on MarketLive Performance Index figures that rely on activity from nearly 100 E-Commerce sites, according to this Internet Retailer story. The piece quoted Jaye Sullivan, senior Internet strategist at MarketLive, as saying that about two-thirds of consumers now start their research at search engines, “which means many visitors are new to E-Commerce sites and more likely to click off quickly if they don’t find what they want. More people are doing research and they’re price-sensitive, so they’re opening up more carts to check out the price.”…

Using virtual reality, $18 billion consumer goods giant Kimberly-Clark is creating virtual depictions of stores, shelves, products and displays—even sounds and smells people encounter while shopping—to enhance traditional means of research, according to this story in CPG Matters.

“With virtual reality, K-C and its strategic retail partners have a stealth, risk-averse way to test new products, packages, display positions, assortments and point-of-purchase materials without taxing muscles or bearing the cost of physical goods movement,” the story said. “Depictions of retail interiors on the full wall-size screen at its Innovation Design Studio in Greenville, Wis. (opened in May 2007), are realistic and reflective of real-world shopping.” An interesting discussion about this effort–along with skeptical thoughts about some of the sales increase claims–is in the comments area of this RetailWire piece.…

A pair of British shopping centers is experimenting with a creative way to leverage consumer cellphones. The consumers are being surreptitiously tracked by the signals emitted by all mobile devices and a database notes when consumers “enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there and what route they take as they walked around,” according to a report in The London Times.

A spokesperson for the vendor behind the trials–Path Intelligence, of Portsmouth–said its equipment was just a tool for market research. “There’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokesperson said. “There’s nothing personal in the data.” But their system does apparently grab a consumer’s phone’s unique IMEI number, which is found on all GSM and UMTS mobile phones. The carrier would theoretically have the data to match it to personally identifiable data.…

Although this doesn’t shed any light on this year’s recession, American consumers were certainly spending-friendly last year, having spent with retailers $201 billion more last year than the year before, according to new figures published Tuesday (May 20) by The Nilson Report.

But in a trend that might prove to be bad news for retailers, Nilson reported a sharp move away from credit card and toward debit cards. “Purchase volume on Visa and MasterCard debit cards increased by $97.11 billion in 2007. Visa’s increase was $58.16 billion, while MasterCard’s increase was $38.95 billion,” the report said. The bad part? These figures confirm that consumers often spend a lot less with debit cards: “The average annual purchase volume per Visa debit card was $2,046 in 2007, down from $2,350 in 2006. The average annual purchase volume per MasterCard debit card was $1,715, up from $1,583.” …

The RFID market has a healthy future, looking at a 15 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years, hitting $9.7 billion by 2013, according to a report issued Tuesday (May 20) by ABI Research.

These figures highlight an RFID market that is growing “robustly,” said ABI research director Michael Liard, pointing to recent commitments from Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club and the German retail giant Metro AG as key factors. …

Sears is in a fascinating online position. On the one hand, the $50 billion 3,800-store-chain says its online numbers are soaring, with the number of unique visitors in February 2008 reportedly rising 20 percent in that month. But Sears.com has also run into quite a few speedbumps. Read more...

Some British convenience stores are trialing a facial biometric program to try and improve the accuracy of guessing the age of customers for age-restricted alcohol purchases. The systems “capture facial measurements that will be checked against a database of profiles of known offenders,” according to this story in ComputerWeekly.

The story quotes an exec with a POS firm involved as saying that the capabilities are relatively recent. “Until now, combining the many technologies has been virtually impossible, but we have jointly come up with a way of automatically reviewing moving clips that are constantly changing,” said Charlie Willetts, managing director of Charton, “and they are now able to use this as part of a bespoke facial recognition system.”…

Tesco’s experiment with an all-self-checkout store in the U.S. is delivering surprisingly favorable customer satisfaction stats. Internal Tesco customer surveys for its Fresh & Easy stores are finding some 90 percent of its customers saying they were either “satisfied or very satisfied” with the checkout experience while another 27 percent say that “it doesn’t matter” what format the checkouts take, according to this story in The Retail Bulletin. The story said Tesco’s survey showed that only 13 percent of respondents prefer a conventional staffed checkout.

“Helping the Fresh & Easy situation is the fact that bananas are the only product available loose (because they are too variable in size and react badly to shrink-wrapping) whereas everything else is packaged and barcoded, thereby reducing the potential for problems at checkout and for the intervention of staff,” the story said. “This reduction in the need for staff assistance has been achieved through the ongoing development of self-service technology with (Tesco) citing the introduction of more advanced barcode look-up tables that are indexed on the most popular products sold in each store and improved standard deviation on the weight measured versus the weight expected of items.”…

"As a result of a defect in the software program for the packet sniffer, the packet sniffer automatically deactivated whenever the compromised (Dave & Buster's) POS servers rebooted in the normal course of the operation of the servers," the indictment said. "Therefore, in order for the packet sniffers to capture data from the compromised D&B POS servers on an ongoing basis, the defendants had to regularly reactivate the packet sniffers." This group might even have had a hand in the TJX incident. Read more...

For e-tailers who still think that Web video may be a fad, consider this stat: In March 2008, U.S. Internet users watched 11.5 billion online videos. That’s a 13 percent gain from the prior month and a 64 percent gain from the identical month the prior year, according to Comscore.

In March, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with more than 4.3 billion videos viewed (38 percent share of all videos), gaining 2.6 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 98 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 477 million videos (4.2 percent), followed by Yahoo Sites with 328 million (2.9 percent) and Viacom Digital with 249 million (2.2 percent).…

When TJX announced a MasterCard agreement last month to pay $24 million for data breach costs stemming from the industry’s worst payment card data breach, it was contingent on at least 90 percent of the banks agreeing.

No surprise, but TJX made that acceptance rate with room to spare, coming in at 99.5 percent, the retailer announced May 14. …

NeoCatena Networks has in the wings a product designed to stop fraudulent or bad tag data from getting into the system from the supply chain.

Applying Internet-level security to RFID is something that has not gone very far, according to this RFID Update story about the anticipated rollout. NeoCatena Networks is developing RF-Wall, an appliance to be installed between RFID readers or controllers and middleware servers, edge servers or host applications in networked RFID systems. The product acts as a firewall that authenticates RFID tags prior to allowing their data to pass into enterprise systems and also scans input to detect and block malware. RF-Wall works by using the unique tag ID to create a digital signature.…

Retailers focused on contactless payment might want to circle July 24, 2008, on their calendar. That is when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will hold a hearing in Seattle “to explore the growth of contactless payment systems and the implications for consumer protection policy.”

Here are the details of the FTC’s hearing along with a link to submit comments electronically. There are lots of legitimate pros and cons on this issue, but the panel should at least understand the merchant’s perspective.…

To state the obvious: It's getting consumers to use them. I say it's obvious, but one wouldn't guess that based on what the vendors were saying this week. Read more...

Las Vegas was hosting the 2008 Food Marketing Institute and Marketechnics show, which felt like self-checkout central this week. Read more...